David Sylvan, Professor of International Relations, and Former Head of the Political Science Department at Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, explains in this interview that much of US foreign policy (as even the CIA would concede, says Professor Sylvan) revolves around acquiring clients, maintaining clients and engaging in hostile policies against enemies deemed to threaten them. It is a peculiarly American form of imperialism. Ranging over examples from US support for a monarchy in Saudi Arabia, its support for the coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile (when Henry Kissinger said, ‘I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people’), its role in persuading Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to step down, and its support for the military in Egypt, Professor Sylvan paints a picture of a US foreign policy based on maintaining the status quo in its client states. Change is almost always seen as threatening.